Summers: It’s Time to Examine Tenure Reform, Investigate Who’s Funding Campus Protests

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “AC360,” Harvard Professor and President Emeritus and former Harvard President Larry Summers called for “close investigations” of the funding sources of the recent protests on college campuses and for “a lot of soul searching” regarding changes in university governance because the “trustees, who are the ultimate fiduciaries, who make all these rules about tenure and everything else have been much too passive through too much of this episode.”

Summers said, “I think, just as anybody on a university campus, when they get funding from the outside for their activities, is expected to be accountable, I think there need to be close investigations of how these protest efforts are being funded.”

After criticizing some of the actions of faculty and stating that there is a lack of accountability for the actions of some members of school faculty, Summers stated, “I think there needs to be a lot of soul searching about the way that universities are governed, and my own sense is that trustees, who are the ultimate fiduciaries, who make all these rules about tenure and everything else have been much too passive through too much of this episode.”

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